Reflections on moving beyond a native norm in analyzing grammatical gender marking in an additional language

Research profile seminar,
Lecture

Guest lecture within the research area Languages and Learning, Department of Languages and Literatures. All interested are welcome!

Second language acquisition scholars have criticized the field's preoccupation with native, monolingual targets, which may implicitly take a deficit view of learners and ignore the reality of multilingualism. Studies using such targets tend to conduct error analyses or other assessments of accuracy that involve comparing learners to native speakers or prescriptive norms. Cook and Li Wei (2016), The Douglas Fir Group (2016), Ortega (2013, 2017), and Slabakova (2016), among others, have advocated for conceptual and methodological reform regarding the role of monolingual targets in SLA. In this seminar, I report on a collaborative project in which my co-authors and I have attempted to respond to the call for reform by offering a reconceptualization of learner data (by way of the dependent variable in our analysis) in a prescriptive-independent manner. Specifically, we propose an analysis of the development of grammatical-gender marking behavior in additional-language Spanish and French that crucially does not rely on a native or prescriptive norm.